Monday, June 4, 2012

Drone Strike Kills 14 in Pakistan

By DECLAN WALSH

Published: June 4, 2012

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Missiles fired from a suspected American drone killed at least 14 people in Pakistan’s tribal belt early Monday, the third strike in three days and a signal of the Obama administration’s determination to press ahead with the controversial covert campaign even as it conducts tense political negotiations in Islamabad.

The attack in North Waziristan, a bustling hub of Taliban and Al Qaeda militancy along the Afghan border, was the eighth strike since a major NATO summit meeting in Chicago ended two weeks ago without agreement on reopening NATO supply lines through Pakistan.

Pakistan blocked the supply lines in November after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, and weeks of negotiations have become bogged down in arguments over transit fees.

With a Congressional deadline looming, officials on both sides agree that time for a deal is running short. A senior Defense Department official, Peter Lavoy, is due in Islamabad this week as part of urgent efforts to break the deadlock.

Pakistani officials said on Monday that two missiles slammed into a compound and a pickup truck in Hassu Khel, a small village just south of Mir Ali, the second-largest town of North Waziristan. Fourteen to 16 people were killed in the attack, officials said, making it the deadliest in the tribal belt since November 2011.

A journalist from the area said the compound was being used by Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen militants fighting for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a Qaeda-affiliated extremist group.

Pakistan’s Parliament demanded an end to drone strikes in April, but the country’s powerful military is unable or unwilling to stop them. The latest strike could complicate efforts to end the impasse over NATO supply lines.

“This is nothing but pressure tactics and preparing for the second term,” said a senior Pakistani security official, referring to both the NATO negotiations and President Obama’s re-election campaign. “They want to prove something.”

But a senior American official said the surge was driven by recent good weather over Waziristan, not any desire to pressure the Pakistanis. "Until now the area was socked in by a long stationary front with cloud cover," the official said.

As part of negotiations, Pakistan's leading English language newspaper, Dawn, reported on Monday that the United States had agreed to reimburse $1.18 billion in military aid payments – three quarters of the figure demanded by Pakistan. Now the two sides have two weeks to agree on NATO supply lines, because Congress requires two weeks advance notice to review any new arrangement before the July 4 summer break.

Several of the latest drone strikes have targeted Taliban groups using the tribal belt as a base for attacks on NATO and Afghan forces inside Afghanistan. One strike on Sunday near Wana, the capital of South Waziristan tribal agency, targeted Mullah Malang, a senior commander with a Pakistani group that has carried out regular attacks in Paktika, Paktiya and Ghazni Provinces.

Speaking by phone, a government official in Wana said Mullah Malang and another commander were injured in the attack. “According to our information both are stable now,” he said.

At least three other commanders from the same group, which is led by the militant cleric Maulavi Nazir, have been killed by drone strikes.

They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics.

The surprise announcement Monday is a reminder that NASA isn’t the only space enterprise in the government — and isn’t even the best funded. NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class space telescope might do if used for national security:

“With a Hubble here you could see a dime sitting on top of the Washington Monument.”

NASA officials stressed that they do not have a program to launch even one telescope at the moment, and that at the very earliest, under reasonable budgets, it would be 2020 before one of the two gifted telescopes could be in order. Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne, the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered, “We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”

But this is definitely a game-changer for NASA’s space science program. The unexpected gift offers NASA an opportunity to resurrect a plan to launch a new telescope to study the mysterious “dark energy” that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate.

The scientific community had made the dark energy telescope its top priority in the latest “decadal survey” of goals in astronomy and astrophysics.

But the hoped-for telescope has been blocked by a lack of funding, in large part because of cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope, which is still being readied for a possible launch later this decade. A new space telescope could also serve as a kind of scout for the Webb, Spergel said.

“It would be a great discovery telescope for where Webb should look in addition to doing the work on dark energy,” Spergel said.

The two new telescopes — which so far don’t even have names, other than Telescope One and Telescope Two — would be ready to go into space but for two hitches. First, they don’t have instruments. There are no cameras, spectrographs or other instruments that a space telescope typically needs. Second, they don’t have a program, a mission or a staff behind them. They’re just hardware.

“The hardware is a significant cost item and it’s a significant schedule item. The thing that takes the longest to build is the telescope,” Spergel said. He added, however, “A big cost of any mission is always just people. One of the reason that James Webb has cost so much is that when it takes longer to complete any piece of it, you keep paying the engineers working on it, and you have these big marching-army costs.”

NASA’s windfall takes the pain out of the planned demise of the Hubble, which has been repaired in orbit five times. NASA does not plan any more repair missions, and the Hubble will gradually lose the ability to maintain its position and focus. At some point NASA will de-orbit the Hubble and it will crash into the Pacific.

“Instead of losing a terrific telescope, you now have two telescopes even better to replace it with,” Spergel said.